Tag: Review

Planet Quark is testing having authors write in other languages than English. The following text is a review of QuarkXPress 2016 in German by Holger Bartsch, an IT consultant for publishers and agencies in Germany. Please let us know how you like it.

Please use Google Translate (or any other translation service you prefer), if you do not read German. Thank you!

Planet Quark is testing having authors write in other languages than English. The following text is a review of QuarkXPress 2016 in Italian by Andrea Astolfi, a QuarkXPress user in Italy. Please let us know how you like it.

Please use Google Translate (or any other translation service you prefer), if you do not read Italian. Thank you!

Andrea Astolfi is a creative professional with over 25 years of experience in electronic publishing. Andrea is based in Italy and specializes in the production of books and long documents, characterized by the presence of many images and illustrations.

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people.

Before joining Quark, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. Since 1997 he has played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop and enterprise software.
Starting 2003 Matthias has focused on Quark’s interactive and digital publishing solutions. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represents Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

Since February 2014 Matthias heads Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit and is therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

QuarkXPress crowdsources its wishlist, and hurtles past the competitors

QuarkXPress 2016 brings powerful new features to the table, works with QuarkXPress 2015 compatible extensions, and reveals a remarkably responsive attitude to user requests, which other software houses could learn from.

Alongside a slew of user-requested features which on their own would make the upgrade worthwhile, QuarkXPress brings a pair of major new elements which send it hurtling past the competition.

Go native

The biggest frustration for most designers is getting supplied graphics to match the design. There has been an explosion of exciting new apps to produce maps, diagrams, charts and specialized illustrations—these are great, until you want them to match your brand, rather than impose their own. Then there’s Word’s ‘smart’ art and Excel charts—by far the commonest format for off-brand graphics. These are a nightmare, and designers are often reduced to recreating them element by element, because they don’t import properly into anything.

Now there’s a solution to these lost hours of re-creation: In QuarkXPress 2016 you can paste elements such as vector graphics and text natively from other applications, and import EPS and PDF files and convert them natively into Quark editable vector objects. This is huge.

Illustration apps, of course, have been able to do this for years—after a fashion. However, anyone who has actually tried to import a PowerPoint slide, Excel chart or MagicMaps map knows that so much cleaning up may be required that it isn’t worth the effort. QuarkXPress has leap-frogged not only its own main competitor, but also the world’s leading illustration application in accurately bringing in and converting the most troublesome graphics.

Fonts, text, and colours come across flawlessly, with text in editable form, rather than broken up into single words, single letters, or baffling hieroglyphics.

Screenshot: the dreaded Excel Chart. Managers can’t resist including them in documents, but Illustrator garbles the text, meaning they often have to be recreated. QuarkXPress 2016 pastes them flawlessly from the clipboard into native objects allowing for them to be matched against official colours and styles, instead of Excel’s default styles.

There are still opportunities for improvements here, based on how the originating application treats its files. For example: Word smart art copy/pastes as low-resolution images, but if exported as PDF, they import and convert into good Quark vectors. Excel’s bar, pie and line graphs copy/paste fine, but the odd conical charts (seriously, does anyone still use these?) come across as image files no matter what you do.

With full page PDFs, it means that there is now no barrier to taking a layout from some indeterminate source and turning it straight into a Quark master page. Logos can be seamlessly extracted, as can graphic elements, and all of these are then amenable to Quark’s own quite powerful path combination tools, and the inimitable Super Step and Repeat. It works for vector elements and bitmap elements, and you can save these out as images and reimport if you want to keep them separate from the main file.

Importing an EPS or PDF file and converting to native objects also adds the colours used to Quark’s list in the colour-space in which they are saved. This means that you can now pick up a full set of brand-approved CMYK or RGB values, even if these differ from Quark’s internal conversions, without having to enter the numbers by hand.

What is remarkable here is how fast Quark is then able to work with the new objects. A logo should not cause any application any trouble, but if you import a GIS-derived map of, say, an English county with all of its statistical output areas, most applications grind to a halt. Quark’s leading competitor can’t import PDFs or EPS as native objects, but if you do try to copy and paste the aforementioned county map from Illustrator, that competitor grinds to a halt, before eventually coming up with an apologetic error dialogue.

Can we have an app for that?

It will thrill some users, and not interest others, but Quark can now natively create and export standalone HTML5. No third party software or subscriptions are required. Quark calls it “HTML5 Publications” and it can be created fresh or Print layouts can be created to digital layouts and then exported. From a digital layout, features such as popups, slideshows, video and animations can be applied as easily as creating text boxes and importing graphics. As significantly, imported graphics can be anything that Quark supports. It is not necessary to convert EPS files to PNG or JPEG. Quark does it all, seamlessly. What’s more, you can export from the same digital layout to multiple formats — HTML5 Publications, ePub (fixed layout and reflow), Kindle, content for native apps — and all the features that the format supports will be available.

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people.

Before joining Quark, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. Since 1997 he has played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop and enterprise software.
Starting 2003 Matthias has focused on Quark’s interactive and digital publishing solutions. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represents Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

Since February 2014 Matthias heads Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit and is therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Recent News

Due to popular demand, the first update for QuarkXPress 2018 adds back the font sub menus on MacOS. The free update further adds new JavaScript methods and further improves stability, quality and performance.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are promising to combine the positive aspects of both, native apps and HTML. Learn how you can easily create a PWA out of WordPress. Or by converting an AI, PDF, IDML (InDesign) or QuarkXPress into a PWA.

Need to sort text in QuarkXPress? See how this free sample script allows you to sort paragraphs in a selected text box with a single click.

When QuarkXPress behaves erratic or crashes, in most cases corrupt preferences are the cause. Deleting preferences will fix that. Just, where do you find preferences for QuarkXPress on MacOS / OS X and Windows? See here.

Quark has launched a new webinar series with free tutorials about how to create HTML5 Publications (PWA), ebooks and print-ready PDF. Topics also include typography sessions, tutorials about how to use Image Editing and OpenType features and more. First three webinars are online, a new one is coming every two weeks.

Apple announced the next major version of MacOS, MacOS 10.14, called Mojave. Who wouldn't want to try it immediately? Of course risk-free, without jeopardizing production if you have just one Mac. You need a way to revert if not yet satisfied. Here's how to safely test and how to quickly revert if needed.

How do you check whether your website complies to the PWA standard (PWA = Progressive Web App)? See how and see an example scoring 100 (out of 100). And how to easily create a PWA yourself.

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